Posts tagged with "dropbox"

From Instapaper and Pythonista To Dropbox and Evernote As PDF

I’ve already expressed my preference for archiving webpages as PDFs rather than simple “bookmarks” on an online service. When I come across a webpage that I know I want to keep for future reference, I like to generate a clean-looking PDF file with selectable text that I can rely on for years to come.

Lately, I have become obsessed with turning longer articles I find on the Internet also into PDFs for long-term archival. For as much as I like Instapaper, I can’t be sure that the service will be around in the next decades, and I don’t want my archive of longform and quality content to be lost in the cloud. So I have come up with a way to combine Instapaper with the benefit of PDFs, Dropbox, and automation to generate documents off any link or webpage, from any device, within seconds.

Yesterday I put together an iOS and OS X workflow to generate PDFs remotely on my Mac, starting from a simple bookmarklet on iOS. On an iPhone or iPad, I can simply hit a button in Safari, and wait for Pythonista to turn a webpage (that’s already been passed through Instapaper’s text bookmarklet) into an .html file in my Dropbox, which is then converted to PDF and added to Evernote. It sounds complex, but in actual practice I can go from a Safari webpage on iOS to a PDF in the Evernote app in around 30 seconds. Hopefully you’ll find this quick solution useful; feel free to modify it and/or send suggestions. Read more

Automatic Screenshot Uploading with Dropbox and Automator→

Automatic Screenshot Uploading with Dropbox and Automator

Matteo Agosti figured out a simple yet effective way to upload items to your Dropbox Public folder and automatically receive their URLs in the clipboard: Automator.

After long time using various utilities to automatically share my screen shots when I updated to Montain Lion I had to find another solution as many of them stopped working. It came to my mind that OS X is bundled with Automator, an extremely powerful utility that I always relegated to thumbnails generation. So I decided to give it a try and I eventually made it. That’s how I did.

His folder action is extremely simple: it monitors a folder, filters items that begin with “Screen Shot” and that are images, then moves them to your Dropbox Public folder. By using your unique Dropbox ID, it places a link in the clipboard guessing what the final URL will look like; the URL is made of the standard initial “dropbox.com/u/” portion combined with a URL-encoded version of the file’s name.

The obvious downside is that this workflow isn’t directly communicating (i.e. uploading) with Dropbox: it’s simply moving files and composing the link that you will get once the upload is finished. In my tests, for instance, the URL received by the workflow became available after 10-20 seconds – when the Dropbox app actually finished uploading the file. After that, the URL was indeed correct.

Still, if you’re looking for a simple way to upload public Dropbox files and get a link back, you should check out Matteo’s post.

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Better Dropbox Camera Uploads with CameraSync

Two weeks ago I wrote about my new Dropbox-based workflow for photos. Towards the end of the article, I mentioned how I was handling uploads from my iPhone:

The official Dropbox app recently gained the capability of automatically uploading photos to the Camera Uploads folder: this means every time I go out and take some photos, I can come back home, open the Dropbox app, let it do its magic, then delete the photos from my iPhone. The photos will be uploaded to the Camera Uploads folder, and sorted using the same Hazel workflow described above.

Thanks to a third-party app, I’ve managed to (partially) automate the process of uploading photos from my iPhone (and iPad) as soon as I get home. I’m now using CameraSync to upload photos to Dropbox automatically. Read more

Latest Dropbox Beta Brings Redesigned Menu

Announced last night on the public forums, the latest beta of Dropbox 1.5 for Mac brings a completely redesigned popup menu, support for Mountain Lion’s Notification Center, a new installer, and better performance.

Sporting a new modern look, the redesigned popup menu is reminiscent of “popovers” that have become extremely popular among iOS developers. The new menu takes a more visual approach at displaying changes in your Dropbox, with icons for added or deleted files (that you can click to quickly go to Dropbox), a play/pause button for sync, and a large “Open Dropbox folder” to launch a Finder window at the “root” of your Dropbox.

This new popup combines all the functionality from the older tray menu with a new view of your Dropbox’s event stream, letting you see your (or other people’s) latest changes. In addition, you can use the events to easily view, share, or restore files.

Alongside the new appearance of Dropbox in the menubar, the team also says version 1.5 will bring full Notification Center support and a new, simpler installer for Mac users. The new installer works as advertised: you can simply double-click the icon for Dropbox to “update” itself to a new version. Unfortunately, while enabled in Notification Center, I haven’t been able to test the new notifications on the desktop, as I assume the functionality isn’t quite ready yet in this beta.

Personally, I think what Dropbox is showing in this experimental build is very promising. The popup menu was in need of a serious upgrade, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it will evolve throughout the next betas.

To download the latest Dropbox experimental build (and send feedback to the developers), you can head over the Dropbox forums.

Moving From iPhoto To Dropbox

I like iPhoto on the Mac. The app’s interface sports Apple’s proverbial attention to polish and details, the Faces feature is nice, and I like the possibility to visualize photos on a map, just as I find Photo Stream very convenient for my blogging workflow. However, I realized that I don’t want to depend on iPhoto to store the photos that, twenty years from now, I’ll look back to as memories. I need my photos — moments captured as .jpeg files — to be photos, not a database. And at the same time, I need to be able to access them now from any device I have without having to worry about sync, apps, formats, and corrupted entries. I have decided to move all my photos from iPhoto to Dropbox.

This is something I have been thinking about for the past year. Do I want my photos to be stored inside someone else’s app? And if not, why not do the same for any other media I store on my computer? Should I also ditch Rdio and go back to neatly organized .mp3 files in the Finder?

I have come to the conclusion that photos are irreplaceable. Decades from now, I’ll probably be able to find a 2Pac record somewhere online or in a record store (will those still exist?). But not so with photos. If something — anything — happens to my photos, they’ll be gone forever. There won’t be anyone able to give me my memories back. Just as I do for text files — the words I write — I have chosen to store my photos — the things I experience — as .jpeg files, a format that should still be around for the foreseeable future. Read more

Twitter Archiving Tool Watermark Gets Dropbox Export Feature

Recently relaunched under a new name, Manton Reece’s Watermark is one of my favorite web services. Seamlessly integrated with Twitter, Watermark is an archiving tool that, through filters and custom collections, lets you archive and search your entire timeline. From our previous coverage:

Tweet Marker Plus was one of my favorite services to provide the kind of Twitter functionalities that Twitter the company always ignored: powerful search and filtering tools, collections, and additional browsing options. Like Cue, Tweet Marker Plus has proven to be a worthy addition to my workflow to retrieve tweets and leverage the information shared on the platform every day.

I use Watermark on a daily basis to retrieve tweets that have been shared in my timeline – status updates that would be hard to retrieve using Twitter’s web interface, let alone the official apps. Twitter never invested in powerful archiving and filtering tools, and Watermark provides a fantastic backup solution to know that, in the background and automatically, your timeline will be archived and made searchable for the future. This is important for online data preservation, a subject I’ve been exploring for the past year.

Today’s update to Watermark introduces yet another option to make sure your data will always be with you: automatic Dropbox export. Available in Watermark’s settings, once authorized with Dropbox the service will create archives of filters, collections, and your own tweets as .csv files. For your tweets, the 10,000 most recent ones will be saved, whereas filters and collections are limited to 1,000 for now. As Manton writes on his personal blog:

Dropbox sync fixes that. Watermark can now automatically copy tweets (and App.net posts) from your saved filters and custom collections to CSV files on Dropbox. For example, search Watermark for “iPhone 5”, click “Save as filter”, and the most recent 1000 tweets matching that query will appear in a file called “iPhone_5.csv” on Dropbox. It keeps running in the background, so the files are updated every hour as new tweets matching the search are downloaded by Watermark, even if you aren’t signed in.

Like I said, I use Watermark every day, and being a Dropbox fan as well, it’s great to see the two services coming together. I feel like Dropbox is becoming, for many, the de-facto “filesystem for the web”, and it only makes sense for a service like Watermark, which aims at freeing data from the pressure of Twitter, to gain an export option based on it. Right now, tweets are saved in .csv files with their ID, author’s username, date, service (Twitter or App.net), message, and original URL. In a future version, I hope Manton will consider some kind of plain text export option as well, though that might be tricky; right now, I’m comfortable with the structure of .csv archives.

Watermark is a service I highly recommend, and it’s only $5 per month.

Create OmniFocus Tasks From Drafts, Scratch, Or Any Text Editor Through Dropbox

Back in October 2010, I posted a tutorial on how to add new tasks to OmniFocus or Things using Dropbox, AppleScript, and PlainText by Hog Bay Software. In June 2011, I wrote about more ways to add tasks to OmniFocus (my GTD app of choice), and noted how I had only “scratched the surface of what’s possible to do with OmniFocus and task creation”.

I decided to slightly revisit my workflow now that several “quick Dropbox note-taking apps” like Scratch and Drafts have come out. These apps are already integrated in my daily routine, but the following method works with any text editor, and, obviously, using Dropbox is recommended if you want to be able to create tasks from anywhere. Read more

Turn URLs and Webpages Into PDFs In Your Dropbox

I stumble across a lot of interesting webpages on a daily basis. Sometimes it’s a video I want to watch later; sometimes it’s an article I don’t have time to read right away. Other times, I find a webpage that I want to keep around for future reference. For me, there’s a difference between articles to read later and reference material: whereas a new item added to Instapaper has a short life span in terms of attention (read, share, archive), a webpage I want to keep around forever needs to be turned into a document I can read anywhere, highlight, annotate, and carry around between platforms and devices. For that, I like PDFs.

I keep a “PDFs” folder in my Dropbox that contains all the documents I check upon regularly for work and personal purposes. They can be eBooks, tutorials, or guidelines from Apple that are essential to my writing online. Thanks to the increasing support for cloud services in apps like PDF Expert, GoodReader, and iAnnotate, I can keep a single copy of a PDF in my Dropbox, use the app I want to annotate the document with, and forget about duplicates thanks to sync. Furthermore, I’m fairly sure that, due to their popularity, PDFs will still be readable and supported 20 years from now, so I don’t have to worry about data preservation and file formats.

Lately, I have become obsessed with turning longer articles I find on the Internet also into PDFs for long-term archival. For as much as I like Instapaper, I can’t be sure that the service will be around in the next decades, and I don’t want my archive of longform and quality content to be lost in the cloud. So I have come up with a way to combine Instapaper with the benefit of PDFs, Dropbox, and automation to generate documents off any link or webpage, from any device, within seconds.

(Disclaimer: what follows is an explanation of a hack I created for personal use. It uses publicly available tools and apps to fill a personal need. You shouldn’t create PDFs off websites and redistribute them – you should support the sites you read instead).

In short, I use the Instapaper Text bookmarklet to fetch a webpage’s text and images (while preserving hyperlinks and great typography) and I convert the resulting page to PDF using wkpdf. Created by Christian Plessl, wkpdf is a command line tool that uses WebKit and RubyCocoa for rendering HTML content to PDF. Since wkpdf uses WebKit’s HTML rendering, it can generate good-looking PDFs that maintain most CSS2 and CSS3 stylings and properties. I have tried another command line tool for file conversion, Pandoc, but I like wkpdf better for straight HTML to PDF conversion. Read more

Droplings Simplifies Public Sharing With Dropbox

Dropbox is a fantastic tool for everyone, from individuals to small businesses and teams. At MacStories, we use Dropbox every day. But while it is perfect for working or outsourcing important files you want to access anywhere, there is one feature in Dropbox which always bothered me: quickly creating download links to share files with friends or colleagues. Both in the Dropbox Finder window and web interface the process is just too intricate. I’ve always used other services like Droplr and CloudApp, although lately I’ve been growing tired with using multiple services for the same purpose.

Droplings, a lightweight menu bar app developed by fellow German freelance developer Carlo Zottman (developer of the Instapaper-to-Kindle sync tool Ephemera) could finally change that. Currently in beta, Droplings makes it easy to upload files to your “Public” Dropbox folder and share them afterwards.

Firstly, enter your Dropbox ID in the app’s settings. Then, just drag and drop the respective file onto the menu bar icon, and within seconds the file will be uploaded and a Droplings preview link will be in your clipboard, ready for sharing. The default preview page looks pretty nice (as you can see from the screenshots below) and the embedded download link will be based on Dropbox. By clicking on the app’s menu bar icon, you have access to the last five uploaded files, as well as the app’s Preferences, which basically just activate your Dropbox ID and offer an option to activate custom HTML templates for the preview site. Droplings is simple and fast, and, in my opinion, way better than copying files into the Dropbox Finder window and right-clicking to generate a download link.

Droplings for Mac

Droplings for Mac

If you miss this simplicity of sharing with Dropbox as much as I do, go ahead and try Droplings. Since it is currently in beta (v. 0.9.x), you can download it for free on the app’s website.